“The description of a new species of crayfish may detail every bristle on every segment of its many appendages and never be read by anyone save its author until a related new species is discovered that needs to be compared and documented. And then the scientist expects to have the book containing the first description readily at hand.”

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

“This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...”

“I dreamed a limitless book,A book unbound,Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance.On every line there was a new horizon drawn,New heavens supposed;New states, new souls.One of those souls,Dozing through some imagined afternoon,Dreamed these words.And needing a hand to set them down,Made mine.”

“Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.”

“To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.”